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Restoration & Retouching

Taking a moment to evaluate the tone of an image is tremendously important. In that moment, you should identify the tonal character of the image and imagine what the image ideally would look like after you're finished editing it. This technique, called previsualization, was developed by the black-and-white photographers Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. By imagining the final image, you create a goal to work toward. For example, in Photoshop you open a dark file. Your previsualization would be, I...

Our photographs contain our memories and our legacy, and they connect us to our family and friends. Even if they are cracked, yellowed, or damaged, we don't throw them away. No matter how tattered or faded a photograph is, it still helps us remember and learn about the past. The combination of image, emotion, and memory fascinates me. With the addition of one component to this mixture Photoshop you can make faded colors rich again, remove damage, and clean up mold, making images as clear and...

After you're comfortable working with Levels, Curves is the next tool to add to your Photoshop repertoire. The advantage of Curves is that it can give you 16 points to influence the tonal values of an image, whereas Levels allows you just three highlight, midtone, and shadow points . The Curves dialog box enables you to work with either 0-100 ink percentages or 0-255 tonal values. Click the small triangles circled in figure 2.34 to toggle between the two. From my experience, people with...

In the following exercises, you use Levels to rescue muddy or low-contrast originals and transform them into black-and-white images that are a pleasure to look at because the tones extend across the entire dynamic range from black to white. These exercises use single-channel monochrome black-and-white images. You can use the same techniques on color images, but only if you work on the composite channel the primary histogram and don't venture into tweaking the individual color channels. Working...